Tag: books

More of the Good Stuff

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From  time to time, most of us are moved by a desire to see more fiction out there about something. Possibly something noble and uplifting, in the “I want to see more fiction with realistic and empowered female characters” line; or possibly something not quite so noble and uplifting, more along the lines of “There should be more fiction about pirates; also, crossdressing.”

(Or you could combine the two, and get Anne Bonney and Mary Reed.)

One feels the urge, at this point, to explain to the writers of one’s acquaintance (which is to say, all the writers one has read, because they count as acquaintances for the purpose) that they should address this sad lack. One might even go so far, in the pursuit of the noble and uplifting, as to imply that the failure to do so represents a moral lapse on their part.

This is usually a bad idea. Writers are contrary creatures, who dislike being chivvied in directions they had not already planned to go; moreover, it is often the case that they do not so much choose what to write as write those things which present themselves and demand to be written. Attempting to extort the desired item is more likely to result in a cranky writer than in a piece of fiction meeting the necessary criteria.

The traditional next step, for those with the ability to do so, is to write one’s own fiction to meet the need. “I wrote the book I wanted to read that nobody was writing,” is a not-uncommon statement from writers asked to explain the origins of a particular work.

“But what about those of us who don’t/can’t write fiction?” one might ask. “What are we to do?”

Suffering in silence is probably a bad answer. Better to assume that if one feels the need for a particular kind of fiction, someone else probably does too — and would be happy to share his or her favorite examples of that kind of thing done right. One might even get together with other like-minded readers and post recommendations for more of the good stuff, whatever it might be.

Crossdressing pirate fic recs, anyone?

The Research Thing Again

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Yesterday I brought up the necessity of doing research for fantasy novels.  So the question then arises:  If you’re making up everything including the world and the cultures that people it, where do you go for research and what do you do research on?

Well, if you’re doing high fantasy or sword-and-sorcery or anything set in a pre-industrial world, then you need to do some reading on pre-industrial societies in general.  The easy way out is to take one particular society and base yours on that one, with perhaps a certain amount of cosmetic removal of the obvious serial numbers.  But as Murphy’s Laws of Combat remind us, “The easy way is always mined.”  In this case, the minefield is labeled “cultural appropriation”, and you want to avoid it — even if you don’t care about the ethical issues involved, it’s still bad art.  Better in the long run to do enough reading and research that you’re able to make stuff up without having to steal things in wholesale lots.

(If you’re writing historical fantasy, or alternate-historical fantasy, or steampunk, the sort of stuff you’ll need to research is different, but the need for it doesn’t go away.  At various times I’ve found myself looking up Victorian underwear, Renaissance typographers, and the name of the train line running from Portsmouth to London in 1863 . . . all for the same book.)

If you’re interested in some starting points for fantasy research, you can find a list of suggestions here.

Across the Great Divide

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I’m talking about the barrier between “literary” and “genre” fiction — and the quotes are deliberate, because I consider the distinction, and the barrier, to be an essentially artificial one.

The way it works, published fiction in the English-speaking world (and maybe elsewhere, for all I know, but it’s not a subject upon which I have the authority to speak) divides itself roughly into three parts.  First, you have literary fiction — the books that are reviewed in the literary supplements of national newspapers, that win the major literary prizes, that garner their authors speaking engagements and writer-in-residence posts at big-name universities.  Most of this is mimetic realism, which is to say it is set in and depicts the world as we have agreed to believe it is; occasionally it detours into things like magical realism or surrealism, but mostly it leaves that sort of thing to writers who — while they may write in English — aren’t themselves English or American.  The literary fiction that makes the news and wins the prizes is usually quite good (one of the most useful things I learned on the way to a Ph.D. in English was how to recognize a well-written example of something I didn’t particularly like); I’m not sure what the literary establishment does with the ninety percent that isn’t.  Maybe it’s taken out behind the library and quietly buried in a shallow grave?

Then you have popular commercial fiction, the stuff that’s never going to win its author any big serious awards, but can sometimes earn huge pots of money.  Most of this is also set in present-day consensus reality, only with the dial turned up to eleven.  These are the books that get reviewed in job lots under the header “summer beach reading” or the like; they’re the ones that turn up on the paperback shelves in airport bookstores.  On the high end, they aspire to crossing over into the literary division, but — like social climbers hoping to get invited to the better parties — this seldom works.  The writers of popular commercial fiction are supposed to be content with their money and know their place.

On the low end, popular commercial fiction starts peeling off into the beginnings of genre — chick lit, technothrillers, suspense, and so forth.  But what most readers and writers consider to be genre lit are the things that have their own publishing houses, or their own lines at major publishers:  mystery, romance, fantasy, science fiction, historical fiction.  Westerns used to be a genre, but over the past few decades they’ve retreated back into historical fiction, and from there a few have even moved over into literary.  (Historical fiction has always had an easier time crossing the border than some of the other genres; I’m not sure why.)  Nurse novels are for all intents and purposes extinct.  And so forth.  Genre lit doesn’t make the kind of big money that popular commercial fiction can; and it sure as heck doesn’t get the respect that literary fiction commands.

Why on earth, then, does anybody write genre fiction?  For love, in some cases; for fun, in others.  And because the most exciting place to work, in the landscape of literary creation, is outside the walls of literary respectability, because that’s always been where the excitement starts.

Other People’s Endings

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When it comes to works in a series — novels, films, television, it doesn’t matter which — I like playing the how-would-I-end-this game.  It’s the fiction-writing equivalent of that improvisational drama exercise where you have to construct a skit around four or five random objects drawn from a grab bag (an argyle sock, a popsicle stick, an outdated guidebook to Tblisi on Five Dollars a Day, and a fishing lure with the hook snipped off…you have ten minutes to brainstorm with your group and then we’ll begin) –the idea is to get from where you are to an acceptable victory condition in five moves or less.

It’s an amusing game; but while I’m playing it I have to keep a firm grasp on the fact that the story I’m ending in my head is, despite any surface resemblances, a different story than the one the author is ending.

Review Halloo

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In addition to editing and blogging and occasionally teaching, I also write fiction.  Or, as we sometimes put it around here, “I tell lies to strangers for money.”

Which means that from time to time the books I write get reviewed — sometimes by people who like them, and sometimes by people who don’t. A good review is always nice. A good review that makes it clear that the reviewer didn’t just like the book, but actually got what the writer was doing with it –above and beyond buying groceries and paying the rent — is something beyond nice.

(There’s no predicting which reviewer you’re going to get such a review from, either. Sometimes it’s from a friend who’s liked your stuff since forever; sometimes it’s from somebody whom you’d swear wouldn’t give you the time of day. Just another one of those things that make most writers just a little bit crazy.)

But a good review is not required.

It’s okay if you-the-reader or you-the-reviewer don’t like my book. Maybe the book sucks. It happens sometimes. Bad stuff can happen to the writer, or to the publisher, or to the world in general that causes the book to be radically screwed up in one way or another.

Sometimes what sounded like a good idea in the writer’s head, and a good idea in the proposal stage, and a good idea at the outline stage, turns out to have been a bad idea after all when the time comes to make an actual story out of it. Sometimes it’s a really good idea, but not, as it turns out, a really good idea that the writer in question is able to carry off.

Or maybe the book is a good book for its target audience, and that audience is not you. Maybe it’s a good book that you disagree with so intensely that it makes your eyeballs bleed. And it’s your right to say so, at whatever length you feel necessary.

But please don’t feel like you’re obliged to let me know about it. I don’t go chasing down reviews, whether good or bad – that way madness lies, at least for me – and I’m not especially interested in defending my work after I’m done with it. Once it’s all grown up and out in the world, it needs to stand or fall on its own.

They Can’t All be Winners

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It happens to every reader at least once . . . they pick up the hot new thing that everyone’s talking about, or the landmark classic that everyone says is a must-read, and as far as they’re concerned it might as well be a plate of spinach.  And not the yummy kind that goes into spinach-egg-and-bacon salad, or Something Delicious Florentine, or white lasagna.   No, it’s the limp and bitter kind that gets served up from cafeteria steam tables to defenseless schoolchildren who decide on the basis of the available evidence that spinach isn’t a vegetable, it’s a plot against humanity. Samuel Pepys hit the nail on the head, back in the 1600s:

And so to a booksellers in the Strand, and there bought Hudibras again, it being certainly some ill humour to be so against that which all the world cries up to be the example of wit; for which I am resolved once again to read him, and see whether I can find it or no.

I’m betting he probably didn’t.

It wasn’t Hudibras that did it, in my case, but I’ve certainly had the experience of just not getting the appeal of whatever it is that everybody of my acquaintance currently seems to like. I tried Dune three times – once in high school, once in college, and once in grad school – before deciding that whatever its attraction, I was constitutionally immune.

Middlemarch is another one that didn’t work for me.  I got fifty pages into it, looked at the four hundred and fifty more pages of painfully small type waiting for me up ahead, and said to myself, “Life is too short for this.  I will take my chances with the Cliff Notes.”  But I know that it’s not the book, it’s me, because no book can be a match for every reader.  I’ve got at least one good friend whose taste in many ways marches with mine, who loves Middlemarch with a passion; on the other hand, she can’t stand Moby-Dick, which I love.

(I try to remember this truth when somebody doesn’t like something I’ve written.  Occasionally I even succeed.)

 

Opening Moves

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Some of my favorite first lines:

There once was a tall, skinny, straggly-bearded old wizard named Prospero, and not the one you are thinking of, either.
– John Bellairs, The Face in the Frost

There was a man named Mord whose surname was Fiddle; he was the son of Sigvat the Red, and he dwelt at the “Vale” in the Rangrivervales.
– Njal’s Saga

I love this saga. It’s a long way from Mord Fiddle to Njal Thorgeirsson and all his sons getting burned alive in their house, and it’s all interesting. Some people speak dismissively of the Icelandic sagas as being about nothing but “fighting and flytings”, to which all I can reply is, “Yes. And your point is?” I have low tastes, I suppose.

Listen! We have heard of the glory of the kings of the Spear-Danes in days gone by….
–Beowulf

Beowulf is one of those furniture-of-the-mind books, for me – along with Njal, it was part of my introduction to the Northern Thing, and had I never read it, I would probably be somebody else entirely than I am today.

In summer all right-minded boys built huts in the furze-hill behind the College–little lairs whittled out of the heart of the prickly bushes, full of stumps, odd root-ends, and spikes, but, since they were strictly forbidden, palaces of delight.
– Rudyard Kipling, Stalky & Co.

Although my very favorite Stalky line comes later on: “You’ve been here six years and you expect things to be fair? My hat, Beetle, you are a blooming idiot!” For some reason, it gave me great comfort during my own high school years.

Stalky in general did; there’s nothing like the confirmation that somebody else’s school days were even worse.

Mr. C(lavius) F(rederick) Earbrass is, of course, the well-known novelist.
Edward Gorey, The Unstrung Harp; or, Mr. Earbrass Writes a Novel

This is the single most truthful book about writing that there is. Period. Favorite line, at least this week (concerning the conversation at a literary reception): “The talk deals with disappointing sales, inadequate publicity, worse than inadequate royalties, idiotic or criminal reviews, others’ declining talent, and the unspeakable horror of the literary life.” As they say in some quarters: Word.

Call me Ishmael.
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick is one of the major exceptions to my general lack of fondness for modern novels – but then, considered as a modern novel Moby-Dick is a weird and atypical specimen, and I suspect that the things I like about it are the things that make it atypical. I like the long digressions about whales and whalefishing, for example; in a science fiction novel, that would be the point where the author takes a break to spend a couple of pages talking about the hyperdrive equations.

Sing, O goddess, the anger of Achilles son of Peleus, that brought countless ills upon the Achaeans.
Homer, The Iliad

I know it looks pretentious, but I honestly did read the Iliad – in a prose translation, to be sure, but the whole thing and not some wimpy version expurgated or redacted for the kiddies – when I was twelve, and it blew the top of my head off for weeks.

This is the story of the different ways we looked for treasure, and I think when you have read it you will see that we were not lazy about the looking.
E. Nesbit, The Story of the Treasure Seekers

I like all of E. Nesbit’s stuff, both the fantastical – especially The Enchanted Castle – and the non-fantastical, like this one. Never mind that this is a children’s book; Oswald Bastable is one of the great narrative voices in English prose fiction.

I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus, Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father.
James Thurber, My Life and Hard Times

James Thurber is one of my Style Gods – Thurber, and the Icelandic Sagas, which has to be one of the more warped pairs in the history of literary influences, but there you are.

Hazards of the Course: Endings

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It happens with any long-running and popular sequence of stories, whether it’s a film trilogy, a television show, or a series of novels. The final entry in the sequence could cure cancer, end world hunger, and bring about peace in our time, and people still wouldn’t like it.

I call it the Write-Your-Own-Ending effect. Fans of any long-running series – whatever the medium – are going to invest themselves heavily in their own ideas/speculations/opinions about how the series ought to end. Satisfying all of them at once is going to be impossible. Satisfying any one of them completely is going to be almost as hard, since there’s always going to be something left over that doesn’t please. (“He/she never thanked him/her for this/that/the other damned thing!” “Why wasn’t so-and-so part of the Big Group Hug at the end?” “The ending was all about Titular Hero! Joe/Jane Sidekick barely got a mention! That just goes to show that Titular Hero really is a jerk, just like all us Joe/Jane Sidekick fans were saying all along!” And so on and on.)

The longer the dedicated readers or viewers have been waiting for the conclusion, the stronger the effect is going to be.  Because they will not have been waiting passively all that time — they will have been making their own ending in their heads while they waited.  Some of them will have actually gone so far as to commit their endings to pixels or paper; but even those who don’t take that final step have still been thinking and speculating and developing their own opinions about how things ought to turn out.  So when it comes time for them to evaluate the actual conclusion to the work, they’re not just going to be holding it up against the previously existing material to see how well it fits — they’re also going to be holding it up against their own internally-developed Best Possible Ending, and the further it deviates from that ending, the more unhappy they’re going to be.

Where You Buy Books

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This is not a post where I wax nostalgic for the small independent bookstores of old.  The reason for this is that I didn’t grow up in Boston or New York or Philadelphia (fine cities that they all are), or in any of the other big cities that actually supported independent bookstores back in those days.  I grew up in a medium-sized small town in north Texas, about eighty miles north of where Dallas was back then — these days, it’s urban sprawl almost the whole way, covering what used to be good farmland where you could raise winter wheat and Black Angus cattle, and that’s one of the reasons I don’t go back to Texas any more.  And back then, there was no independent bookstore closer than the Doubleday store in the Northpark Mall.

What we did have, in that small town, was a corner news stand, which is another thing that’s vanished with the passing years.  It sold the local newspaper, and the Dallas and Fort Worth newspapers, and national papers like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and the Christian Science Monitor, and magazines both respectable and raffish, and cigars and cigarettes and chewing gum, and paperback books in wire spinner racks.  Once a month, on the first Monday, the owner would put up the new science fiction and fantasy releases — I know it was the first Monday, because after my best friend and I had been conspicuously haunting and combing over those spinner racks in search of new stuff for several months, the owner told us so.  After that, we made a point of showing up every first Monday like a two-person horde of book-hungry locusts.

I think, in retrospect, that the bookstore owner must himself have been a science fiction fan, or at least a regular reader in the genre, because he stocked all the new releases from all the houses then publishing sf and fantasy, and also stocked all the major sf magazines — F&SF, Analog, and Galaxy, in those days, plus Galaxy‘s kid sibling, If — and the four or five second-tier mags as well.

Later, of course, our town got its own shopping mall, a small one shared with the next town over, but enough to support a B. Dalton’s with a lot more shelf space for paperbacks than the corner news stand (where the sf and fantasy spinner rack had occupied a couple of square feet near the back of the store, right next to the soft-core porn.)   Later still, I left Texas to live in places that actually had small independently-owned specialty bookstores catering to a variety of tastes.

But the wire racks at Triangle News, and the books I found on them — The Hobbit;  A Wizard of Earthsea; The Witches of Karres; Babel-17; The Moon is a Harsh Mistress; so many of the works that made me into a reader, and later a writer, of science fiction and fantasy — remain close to my heart.

It’s All in the Search Terms

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An actual conversation that took place in the office here, a couple of books back:

My co-author to me: I know that the term “latrine” didn’t come into use until World War I, when the Army got it from the French. What did they call them during the Civil War?

Me: Um. Let me look around and find out.

(Sound of typing, as I Google “US Army sanitary regulations Civil War” and find, in short order, a reference to a text entitled Customs of Service for Non-Commissioned Officers and Soldiers, written in 1864 by a Brigadier-General August Kreutz, which includes a section on camp cleanliness. A little more Googling, and I have the text itself.)

Me: The word was “sinks.”  God, I love research.

I also love the internet.  Back in the olden time, locating an obscure text like that would have required a visit to a university research library and some quality time spent with the card catalog — and while I enjoy roaming at will through the stacks as much as any bibliophile, it’s not something easily done when you live in a small town an hour and fifteen minutes north of the nearest traffic light.